Blue Monday

‘That’s my guilty pleasure,’ said Sandy. ‘I… Hang on, what’s up?’

Frieda wasn’t paying attention. She was suddenly absorbed in a news story she was reading.

Sandy leaned over and read the headline: ‘Little Mattie Still Missing: Mum’s Tearful Plea’. ‘You must have heard about it. It’s only just happened. It was all over the papers yesterday.’

‘No,’ murmured Frieda.

‘Think of what the parents must be going through.’

Frieda looked at the photograph across three columns of a young boy with bright red hair and freckles, a lopsided grin on his face, and his blue eyes looking sideways towards whoever was behind the camera. ‘Friday,’ she said.

‘He’ll probably be dead by now. I feel sorry for the poor bloody teacher who let him go. She’s become a hate figure.’

Frieda didn’t really hear what he was saying. She was scanning the story about Matthew Faraday who had slipped out of his Islington primary school unnoticed on Friday afternoon and been last seen going towards the sweetshop a hundred yards or so away. She picked up another paper and read the same story again, a bit more colourfully written, with a sidebar by a profiling expert. She picked up each paper in turn – it seemed every angle had been covered. There were pieces about the parents’ agony, the police investigation, the primary school, the reactions of the community, the safety of our children today.

‘What a strange thing,’ Frieda said, as if to herself.

It was raining and there weren’t many people in the flower market. Frieda was glad of the rain. She liked the feel of it in her hair and she welcomed the street’s emptiness. She and Sandy walked past stalls selling great bunches of flowers and plants. It was only the middle of November but already they were selling things for Christmas – cyclamen, sprigs of holly, hyacinths in ceramic bowls, wreaths for front doors and even bunches of mistletoe. Frieda ignored all of these. She loathed Christmas, and she loathed the run-up to Christmas, the frenzied shoppers, the tat in the shops, the lights that were put up too early in the streets, the Christmas songs that belted out from overheated shops day after day, the catalogues that poured through her door and into her bin, and above all the insistence on the value of family. Frieda did not value her family and they did not value Frieda. A great gulf lay between them, impassable.

The wind was flapping the awnings of the stalls. Frieda stopped to buy a large bunch of bronze chrysanthemums. Alan Dekker had dreamed of a son with red hair. Red-haired Matthew Faraday had vanished. Eerie, but meaningless. She pushed her face into the damp fragrance of the flowers and took a deep breath. End of story.

She couldn’t help pondering it, though. And that night – a wild and windy night that clattered bin lids along streets, bent trees into strange shapes, sped clouds in dark masses through the skies – she insisted to Sandy that she needed to spend some time alone, and went for a walk, and found her feet took her to Islington, past the grand houses and civilized squares to the poorer pockets. It didn’t take her long to get there, just fifteen minutes or so, and eventually she found herself standing looking at the bank of flowers already stacked up outside the primary school where Matthew had last been seen. Some of the flowers were already dying inside their cellophane wrappers and she caught a sweet whiff of decay.

Whales are not fish. Spiders have eight legs. Butterflies come from caterpillars and frogs come from tadpoles and tadpoles come from the thick dotted jelly Mrs Hyde sometimes has in a jam jar at school. Two and two makes four. Two and two makes four. Two and two makes four. He didn’t know what happened next. He couldn’t remember. Mummy will come soon. If he squeezed his eyes tight shut and counted to ten, very slowly – one hippopotamus, two hippopotamus – when he opened them again, she would be there.

He closed his eyes very tightly and counted, then opened them. It was still dark. She was cross with him, that was it. It was a lesson. He’d gone outside without her tight warm hand. She said never do that, do you promise, Matthew, and he’d promised. Cross my heart hope to die. He’d eaten the sweets. Never take food from a stranger, Matthew. It was a spell. Magic potions, they can change you into what you’re not. Small, like an insect in the corner of the room, and then Mummy wouldn’t see him; perhaps she would step on him. Or he had a different face, a different body, the body of a scary animal or a monster, but him trapped inside it. She would look at him and not understand that it was him, Matthew, her little muffin, her honey-bunch. But his eyes would be the same, wouldn’t they? He would still be looking out of himself with his eyes. Or he would have to call and shout to tell her who he really was, but his mouth was stuck shut and all he could hear when he cried was an echoey humming in his head that was like one of those horns you hear when you’re on a ferry-boat at sea, going on holidays with Mummy and Daddy. Lonely in the distance and a shiver of dread goes through you, though you don’t know why, and you want to be hugged and safe because the world is wide and deep and full of surprises that make your heart too big inside your body.

He needed a wee. He concentrated on not needing a wee. He was too big to wet himself. People laughed and pointed and held their noses. Warm wet, then cool, then cold and stinging against his thigh and the thin, high smell at the back of his nose. His eyes were wet too, stinging wet. He couldn’t wipe them. Mummy. Daddy. I am very sorry I did wrong. If you take me home now, I will be good. I promise.

Or he had been turned into a snake, because his arms weren’t arms any more but part of his body, though he could wiggle his fingers, and his feet weren’t feet any more but stuck together. Once upon a time, there was a little boy called Matthew who broke a promise and who ate a magic potion and was turned into a snake to punish him. Slithering on the floor. Wood under his cheek. He could feel it and he could smell it. If he wriggled, could he move like a snake? He bunched up his body and straightened it again and his body jerked across the floor. Suddenly his face met something cool and firm, with a curved point at the end. He lifted his head and nudged it but it didn’t move. Then he stretched himself and laid his cheek on top of it, to see what it was. Once, in Hide and Seek, he had hidden in his parents’ wardrobe. He had curled up in the darkness, giggling and a bit scared, just a tiny stripe of light between the double doors, and waited to be found. He could hear them in the house, looking in stupid places like behind curtains. He had put his head on something like this then. Now his wet cheek felt a coil of string and a knot.

The shoe pulled away and his head fell back on the floor with a thump. The shoe poked him in his side. Too hard. A small bright light went on and he rolled over so he was staring up at it and he couldn’t see anything now except the piercing light. It exploded in his eyes and flowered inside his head, and around its throbbing centre the darkness was even darker.

The light went off. The shoe pushed him to one side. There was a sudden rectangle of grey in the blackness, then a click and the grey disappeared.

Chapter Fourteen

Frieda rang the bell on the familiar door. It made no sound and she couldn’t tell whether it was broken or whether it was ringing deep within the house. She pushed the button again. Still no sound. She rapped the heavy knocker several times. She stepped back from the door and looked at the windows. There were no lights visible, no movement, no sign of any presence. Could he have gone away? She knocked again, more heavily this time, so that the door shook. She bent down and pushed the letterbox open. She peered through. There were letters on the mat. She was about to leave when she heard something from inside. She knocked again. Now there was definite movement. She heard footsteps approaching, a rattling, the sound of a bolt being pulled and then the door opened.

Reuben narrowed his eyes, as if even the grey of a cloudy November morning was too much for him. He was dressed in a pair of grubby jeans and a partially unbuttoned shirt. It wasn’t immediately clear that he recognized Frieda. He seemed puzzled and confused. Frieda could smell alcohol and tobacco and sweat. He had clearly spent at least one night in his clothes.

‘What’s the time?’ he said.

‘Quarter past nine,’ said Frieda.

‘Morning or night?’

‘It looks like daytime to me.’

‘Ingrid’s gone,’ said Reuben.